Although the New York Times has lots of guesses about how China identified CIA assets, it ignores the role Hillary’s server may have played.

In a move that crippled US intel, China, between 2010 and 2012, somehow became aware of the identities of people cooperating with the CIA in China. And yet, the NYT seems to be deliberately ignoring the 800 lbs gorilla in the room as it reports on this intelligence disaster.

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. . . .

Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.

Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years. . . .

By 2013, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. concluded that China’s success in identifying C.I.A. agents had been blunted — it is not clear how — but the damage had been done.

It wasn’t until 2016 that we learned that Hillary had used a private email server to conduct all of her business as Sec. of State. We know that she placed on her private server, or otherwise discussed in email chains appearing on her private server, thousands of bits of information classified Secret, and at least fourteen bits which were classified Top Secret by our intelligence agencies. Did any relate to China, and if so, could Chinese intelligence have used that information to identify our intel assets?

Bottom line, given the timing of this Chinese intelligence coup coincident with Hillary’s use of a private server to store our nation’s secrets, it seems that one of the very first questions a barely competent investigative reporter should be asking is whether any of the information Hillary placed on her private server could have been a source of China’s counterintelligence? Amazingly enough, the NYT makes no mention of Hillary in its article. Go figure.

Watch the headlines and pundits today transmogrify “hope” into “asked to end the Flynn investigation.”

That isn’t news.

That is an assassination.

I also think we are seeing with the recent leaks the first phase of Mutually Assured Destruction of our government. The leaks will destroy Trump if they continue. But if that happens, no Democrat and no anti-Trump Republican will ever be able to govern in the future. Payback is guaranteed. The next President to sit in the White House will be leaked to the point of ineffectiveness. And that’s how the Republic dies.

Adams actually things the digital revolution which pave the way from our Constitutional representative democracy into some sort of electronic direct democracy. I’m not so sanguine. I see chaos, followed by a dictatorship (because that’s invariably what ends chaos), followed by . . . well, I don’t actually know, but it’s not good.

I don’t want to talk long-term now, though. This post is dedicated to a series of quick links examining the current state of our politics, the slow motion assassination that Adams identified, and the reasons that you’re not crazy to have voted for Trump and to continue to support him. Indeed, if you pull back from the obsessive media behavior and the puppet-like responses in D.C. to media malice, you’ll see that things really aren’t that bad.

A full-throated intellectual defense of Donald Trump. This article came out in January and I’m just shocked that I missed it. Daniel Bonevac, an academic (yes! an academic) from the Univesrity of Texas in Austin (where he’s the only conservative in his department), explains precisely why he voted for Donald Trump. And he gets it. He totally gets it.

The article is long and I can’t find a specific quotable quote because it’s so dense with ideas (although never stuffy, confusing, pompous, or boring). I can assure you that you’ll feel smart, happy, patriotic, and reasonable once you read it. Then you should share it with your fellow Trump supporters because, in the face of months of sustained attack, it’s a real morale booster. I’m not exaggerating. Bonevac’s post one of the best things I’ve read in I don’t know how long and every non-Leftist, whether a Trump supporter or not, should read it. [Read more…]

Anti-Trump Progressives are suffering from an existential despair that has them believing his presidency means the imminent end of all life on earth.

I was speaking the other day with a very good friend, who is one of the kindest people I know and who is also a fervent anti-Trump Progressive. Her Progressivism comes about because, despite being highly intelligent, she really does lead with her heart. This means that Leftist pleas to emotion are catnip to her. Blinded by Progressive media photos of illegal immigrants being marched away from the families they had even knowing they could get caught, she is blind to the families of those killed by illegal immigrants who shouldn’t have been here to kill in the first place. After all, the photos heart-wrenching photos of the victims of illegal killers do not make the front page of the New York Times and their families never ended up on Oprah.

But as I said, she is a good friend. She’s stood by me through thick and thin, and never allowed the fact that I’m a conservative to sway our friendship — something I cannot say about many Progressives. That’s why I forgave her when, upon hearing that the CIA can program cars to turn into assassination mobiles, her first response was “That can’t be true. If it were true, they would have killed Trump and we wouldn’t have to suffer this way.”

Normally, I’m not one to condone wishing for or celebrating the assassination of a democratically elected leader. I learned that moral lesson back in 1981, when I was a student at Cal and the news came down that Reagan had been shot. Unlike the horror that attended JFK’s assassination in 1963, at Cal in 1981 people were thrilled that Reagan had been shot . . . and then deeply disappointed to learn that he’d survived the attempt.

When I spoke to my parents later that day, and repeated these UC Berkeley sentiments as if they were my own, my parents turned on me. They were absolutely horrified that any moral person could (a) wish for the murder of a democratically elected leader and (b) cheer on anyone’s death.

My parents, who had lived through WWII, knew death. They didn’t like it. And while they had no qualms about killing Germans and Japanese to win the war, they were sufficiently moral to understand that, while a kill-or-be-killed situation makes killing “the other” reasonable, we lower ourselves when we cheer on the death of our own or when we dehumanize people as the Germans and Nazis did . . . or as I and my fellow Cal students did. I never made that mistake again.

Even now, while I can devoutly hope that every single ISIS soldier gets killed (with or without attendant suffering), because these men are unspeakably cruel and brutal, I do not forget that they are human beings who went to the dark side and that, under better circumstances, they could have been decent men. Yes, I can hold both thoughts in my mind. One thought is about my own and my country’s survival and about abstract justice against overarching evil; the other thought is about my own humanity and the fact that the enemy is a complicated mix of men who have given themselves to evil and men who are themselves so trapped by evil that killing them is still a necessity.

But still, when my friend said that awful thing, I kept silent. It wasn’t just that she’s such a fundamentally good person in my life who, as it turned out, was at the tail-end of an awful day at work, that caused me to hold my tongue. It was also because of that tag end to her sentence. Trump should have died, she said, so “we wouldn’t have to suffer this way.”

James Brosnahan, the man who represented American Taliban John Walker Lindh, happily awaits the time when America’s intelligence community destroys Trump.

The Marin Independence Journal (as in Marin County, the uber-Leftist, hyper-affluent community north of San Francisco), reports on a talk that James Brosnahan gave to the Marin County Trial Lawyers Association. If Brosnahan’s name is familiar to you, it’s because he represented Marin’s homegrown Taliban, John Walker Lindh, who had a role in murdering CIA officer Johnny Spann in Afghanistan during the early days in that war.

Despite his close association with a man whom the CIA must revile, Brosnahan still has faith in the CIA. And where does his faith take him? To the belief that the CIA (and other US intelligence communities) will violate United States law by destroying a duly elected American president:

‘Trump’s not going to make it. He will not make it,” Brosnahan said. “This is America.

“Why is he not going to make it?” Brosnahan continued. “Because Joseph McCarthy didn’t make it. Trump has attacked everybody. You cannot attack the intelligence community, because they will get you. They are scary people. They do stuff.

The new phrase is “fourth branch of government,” referring to the Progressive bureaucracy fighting exile. It’s time to fight back.

The administrative state is not the fourth branch of government. When I said “interesting times,” I meant it. We all knew that our government had gotten too big and we voted for Trump believing that he would make good on his promise to shrink it.

Trump certainly has been trying to fulfill that promise, but the administrative state has been fighting back in ways we never imagined. Rather than recognizing that our Constitution makes it subordinate to the president, so that it must take its marching orders from him, the administrative state is setting itself up as a permanent government in opposition, determined to continue the policies that put Obama into office and kept Hillary out of office.

The Washington Examiner has written an excellent editorial that warns of the dangers in a self-styled fourth branch of government:

As we once noted in a different context, “civil disobedience is properly the tool of the citizenry, not of those entrusted by it to execute the law faithfully.” We also wrote that America “cannot survive every minor public official becoming a law unto himself.” This is just as true of unconstitutional actions by EPA employees as it was for the official about whom we wrote it — Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after the Supreme Court‘s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The Examiner is not the only one sounding this warning. Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA employee and a Democrat is sounding the same warning with special emphasis on people in the intelligence community. Noting the extraordinary power they hold, he says that the only way to keep a free state is for them to keep out of politics — especially since there are constitutional actions they can take if they’re genuinely concerned about a president’s loyalty to the state. (Me, personally, I would have been concerned about Obama’s secret deals with Iran. . . .)

When you’re trained as a spy, you’re taught how to handle these kinds of situations. Upon learning the information, it gets tightly compartmented (restricted) and sent to the Department of Justice or Congress for investigation. If the evidence is found to be credible, the constitution makes clear what happens next: impeachment.

That’s how American democracy should work.

[snip]

However, some of America’s spies are deciding that that’s not enough. For reasons of misguided righteousness or partisan hatred, they’ve taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner. They have prosecuted their case in the court of public opinion, with likeminded media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post serving as court stenographers.

Elected by no one, responsible only to each other, these spies have determined that Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Will we slip so quickly into a banana republic, not because of anything Trump has done (his actions to date have been not only constitutional but consistent with prior presidents, including Obama), but because the Progressives will not give up power?

Lastly, if you want a superbly written article about the risks America faces at the hands of an unelected bureaucracy that refuses to hand over the power it accrued during the Obama era, read Matthew Continetti’s deservedly lauded essay asking who controls America.

Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies, the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class.

Government employees, worried about job security, have turned into a Fifth Column willing to destroy the government rather than risk a drained swamp. I probably should define my term before I go on, as “Fifth Column” is not as common a phrase as it once was. It’s origin goes back to the Spanish Civil War. General Emilio Mola, who fought for Franco’s Nationalist party, assured a journalist in 1936 that he had military superiority as he approached Madrid, not just because of the four columns of troops he commanded in the field, but because he had a “fifth column” (i.e., Quinta columna) of Nationalist supporters inside Madrid who would work to undermine the government from within.

Mola’s definition of his Fifth Column perfectly defines what we’re seeing play out America’s Progressives, with active help from the Obama administration and post-presidency organizations he established, work from within the government to destroy the Trump presidency. I’ve assembled a sizable collection of articles on the topic and will share with you the money quotes from each.

Adam Kredo might have been the first one to get the information showing that the dots, when connected, point not to Flynn but to the Deep State:

I’m working on an irritating little project that requires me to explain to a judge in a polite, non-insulting, ego-building way that I forgive him for not reading the facts or knowing the law, and that I just want to lead his brilliant, informed mind to the truth. Thankfully, Wolf Howling sent me a great email updating me on today’s news, so I’ll pass it on to you:

The thought of a civil war with California just warms my heart. The insane part of this is that the progs look to history and read only the parts of it that they find convenient at the moment. Right now, they are reading John C. Calhoun circa 1860.

Amazing news. Apparently the first human ancestor some 540 million years ago was a progressive.

Over at WUWT, as I’ve said many times, one of the most important things that Trump needs to do is restore scientific integrity.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a very proggy prog, getting shouted down by more hysterical progs for his vote to confirm Mike Pompeo as CIA Chief. The reaction of the hard left is going to end up with a party that is purged and ends up to the left of Marx in four years. That is good news so long as Trump improves the economy significantly.

The EU apparatchiks are quite concerned about Trump’s 90 day order. The author makes a good point at the bottom of the post: If Trump secures the US borders, the people in Europe will be holding Merkel et. al accountable.

Today’s joke: What do you call a deer who can use all four of its legs equally well?

— bambidexterous.

That was all Wolf Howling. From me, Bookworm, you get a PragerU video about the brake the Arab world has placed on its development:

My addition to the video’s analysis is that, throughout history, antisemitic societies have always been more authoritarian than other societies around them at the same point in history. The fact is that authoritarian societies are always going to be antithetical to human development.

This is a random news edition because I’ve spent the day doing such scintillating things as cleaning the kitchen (including behind the refrigerator) to quell an ant infestation and spraying clothes with Pemethrin to prepare for an upcoming trip to some malarial hot spots. Throughout the course of the day, whenever I had a minute, I grabbed random, but interesting links I found on Facebook, through my favorite blogs and, always my best source, from friends who email me. Because I’m heading out soon for Cirque du Soliel, brevity will be the name of the game.

How to handle rape. In America, we’re told that telling women actions they can take to defend against rape is a no-no because it constitutes “blaming the victim.” Instead, men should be taught not to rape. In Austria, which is yet another European country overrun by non-white, non-Christian (or Jewish or Hindu or . . . ) men who come from a decided rape culture, it’s all up to the women to protect themselves.

How to deal with terrorism.Writing at The Atlantic, Uri Friedman looks at the frighteningly simple truck attack in Berlin and concludes that there are only three ways to deal with terrorism on European soil: secure public spaces, expand government surveillance, or learn to live with it. He seems to have forgotten a fourth approach: Expel all the recently admitted refugees. And then expel all known trouble makers. And then break down the ghettos in which the remaining Islamic communities incubate fanaticism.

Progressives say their massive freakout is warranted. Even Progressives are realizing that their complete meltdown is out of the ordinary. But the LA Times is there to assure us that Trump is so horrible — and his supporters so evil — that Progressive mental collapse is an appropriate response. Really.

Ivanka is too good to help women.Elle, yet another women’s magazine that sells Leftism, assures us that Ivanka is a disaster for women. Hillary’s many (ahem) accomplishments were an inspiration, of course, but Ivanka is so damn accomplished that she’s intimidating and sets women’s rights back by decades, maybe even centuries. Moreover, the entire goal of her father’s upcoming presidency is an exercise in nepotism to benefit her alone. Really.

I was discussing with a friend two articles today, when I suddenly saw the future — and believe me, it’s not pretty, or at least not any prettier than Daniel Craig in a lush blonde wig as he carries out his secret agent duties. The first article involved the trauma Milo Yiannopoulos visited upon Rutgers’ students when he gave a campus speech challenging Social Justice Warriors. The second article was learning that the CIA is incorporating into its hiring policies the same activist mindset that SJWs have been demanding on American campuses. The resulting epiphany was how James Bond would play out in this Brave New World.

It all began when Wolf Howling and I speculated about the Bernie Sanders generation — who are they and how in the world did they get so stupid? After all, despite socialism’s manifest and brutal failures everywhere it’s been tried (most recently in a collapsing Venezuela), this generation actually thinks socialism is the answer. Wolf Howling said, accurately, that the poison begins on college campuses. When he said that, my mind immediately summon up what happened after Yiannopoulos breached academia’s sacred domain to carry on his battle against the Social Justice Warriors (warning — AutoPlay video at link):

I was talking with a friend of mine about the totally false alleged rape epidemic on America’s college campuses. While the epidemic may be false, the destruction wrought on young men is very real. Moreover, as false accusations crowd out the real ones, those young women (and men) who are genuinely raped are going to have an infinitely harder time getting taken seriously.

Thinking about this, I told my friend that past generations were probably wise to insist that sex wait until marriage and that, before marriage, young women should be chaperoned, rather than left alone with young men. It wasn’t just to protect the women’s virtue, it was also a way to protect the men’s honor. After all, since time immemorial, the truth about what happens between two people tends to be a mystery.

My friend had a better idea. Harking back to Obama’s recent insistence that all police have body cams, he suggested that all college students have body cams! I liked that idea. Moreover, if the students can’t have a body cam, perhaps the next best thing (certainly for young men who don’t want to be falsely accused of rape) is the “Good2Go” app that makes explicit consent as easy as participating in an Instagram conversation.

We live in strange times. But as I often say, strange and difficult times make for good writing — so I’ve got a lot of good writing to bring to your attention:

Whether you devour this post in one fell swoop or nibble at it throughout the day, I can guarantee you a lot of food for thought:

The VA scandal is gaining traction, as word comes out that the VA already knew back in 2010 that hospitals were manipulating records. Robert Petzel, the top health official for the Department of Veterans Affairs, has resigned ahead of his previously announced retirement, showing that at least someone understands that part of taking responsibility for a job is that you look like you’re getting fired, or fire yourself, when you fail in that role.

Obama, who has never worked in the private sector, still hasn’t figured out that ordinary people, accustomed to private sector job losses for workplace malfeasance, believe it’s appropriate for heads to roll. How else can one explain that, not only is Obama keeping on VA Secretary Ric Shinseki, he’s praising him for a job well done.

***

The risks from the VA scandal extend beyond any immediate political fallout. Indeed, it may be more damaging than Obama & Co. ever imagined, not because it reflects badly on them but because it reflects badly on their entire world view — namely, Big Government:

Because the Democratic party simply is the party of government. It is the party that insists on the nobility, efficacy and intellectual superiority of government. The VA is at the intersection of all the things liberals insist are wise and good and just about government. It is government-run healthcare. It is the tangible fulfillment of a sacred obligation the government has with those who’ve sacrificed most for our nation. It is also the one institution and/or constituency that enjoys huge bipartisan support. The VA, rhetorically and politically, is more sacrosanct and less controversial than Medicare, Social Security, road building, the NIH, or public schools. We are constantly told that we could get so many wonderful, super-fantastic things done if only both sides would lay down their ideological blah blah blah blah and work together for yada yada yada. Well, welcome to the VA. How’s that working out for you?

***

Many commentators noticed that Jay Carney, when asked about the VA scandal, said the same thing he and the president have said about myriad scandals: “Hey, don’t ask us. We only learned about it on TV, just like the rest of you.”

You can tell that their feral little brains are thinking, “Yes! That should let them know that we had nothing to do with the scandal. It’s somebody else’s fault.”

It hasn’t seemed to occur to Obama or Carney that there’s another, better answer: “The President was apprised yesterday about this issue and has already taken steps to deal with it.” That answer would make the President sound like an executive, not an idiot. (Peter Wehner sees “epic incompetence” as the new presidential narrative.)

The fact that the White House resorted to what has become its standard second-term excuse for government scandal with a line about the president hearing about it on TV or by reading the newspapers raises serious questions about both his leadership and the intelligence of his staff. After all, surely it must have occurred to someone at the White House that using the same excuse about hearing of it in the media wasn’t likely to work after it had been employed with little success to distance him from the IRS and other scandals. Such intellectual laziness speaks to a West Wing that is both collapsing from intellectual fatigue as well as having acquired an almost complete contempt for both the press and public opinion.

***

While I’m on the subject of Obama’s incompetence, it seems that the intelligence community is pushing back against both that incompetence and the rank political dishonesty that sees that Obama administration falsely claiming that Islamic terrorism is declining, not increasing.

I feel very strongly that you shouldn’t get into pissing matches with the intelligence community because they probably know things about you that you would prefer no one else know. If this fight between the administration and intelligence heats up, I wonder if someone will start leaking interesting revelations about highly placed officials in the administration, including Obama himself.

***

James O’Keefe has an uncanny knack for exposing Leftist hypocrisy, corruption (financial, intellectual, and moral), and gross illegality. He is back in spectacular style with a video showing three prominent Hollywood types agreeing to take money from an Arab oil sheikh (O’Keefe in disguise) in order to fund an anti-fracking film.

There’s nothing subtle about O’Keefe’s phony pitch, either. In a phone call with director Josh Tickell, O’Keefe explicitly states “My client’s interest is to end American energy independence; your interest is to end fracking. And you guys understand that?” Tickell is okay with that. “Correct. Yes, super clear,” he says.

While many people are shocked about environmentalists getting into bed with big oil in order to stop fracking, I was wondering more about their willingness to send money to Saudi Arabia, rather than to keep it at home.

Of course, O’Keefe just showed three fools in Hollywood. But what about the fact that real, not imaginary, Arab oil influence is huge in Washington, D.C. itself? Jeff Dunetz says that we need to pay attention to this very disturbing reality. Looking at the numbers, Dunetz points out that, not only is the UAE by far the biggest foreign lobby in D.C., the entire pro-Israel contribution (remember the “all powerful Jewish lobby” we keep hearing about?) is just 21% of the UAE’s contribution. Read the whole thing. It’s illuminating.

***

Chad Felix Greene, who is (I believe) gay, says that it’s not unreasonable for people to be wary of transgendered people. It’s not one of his best posts (he’s a very good writer, but this is a bit muddy because he tries to be respectful of all points of view, even as he challenges some of them), but my takeaway is this:

It’s not unreasonable to be dismayed when your chosen sexual partner reveals that he or she started out life as a member of the opposite sex. This is true regardless of whether you’re homosexual or heterosexual. Thus, both a man planning to bed a former man, or a gay man planning to bed a former woman, might be upset to learn about the partners gender history.

It is reasonable, however to refuse to deny the biological reality that underlies transgendered self-definition. Just because someone says “I am a woman,” doesn’t mean you have to pretend that the person once had or still has a penis. You can be respectful of that person’s self-identity (no bullying, teasing, or discriminating), but you don’t have to deny biological and historical reality.

***

Gay marriage is a done deal in America, folks. Although the Supreme Court addressed only the federal Defense of Marriage Act, courts across America are viewing that decision as a green light to overturn voters who said that, in their state, marriage is between a man and a woman. One really can’t blame the judges too much now that, years after those votes were originally cast, the same-sex marriage lobby’s endless advocacy means that 55% of Americans support gay marriage.

I’ve made it pretty clear that my opposition to gay marriage arises primarily because I foresee a coming clash between the First Amendment’s explicit guarantee that Americans have the right to exercise their religion freely and the newly created civil right to marry outside of the traditional boundaries of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. We already know that gay couples will sue business people who, for religious reasons, refuse to provide services for same-sex marriage ceremonies, although they are willing to do business with same-sex couples in all other matters. How long will it be before same-sex partners sue the Catholic Church or a Baptist ministry for violating their civil rights?

***

Spain has been Judenrein since 1492. That has done nothing to prevent the oldest hatred. (You can read more about Spain’s apparently atavistic antisemitism here.)

***

How can one resist Jonah Goldberg on “trigger warnings,” which are just the latest insanity to issue from America’s loony academic citadels? After noting that he doesn’t have a problem with obscure, privately run Leftist blog sites catering to every trigger from audio of snapping fingers to pictures of animals in wigs, Goldberg adds:

But as is so often the case, common sense is barely a speed bump for the steamroller of political correctness. Oberlin College’s Office of Equity Concerns advised professors to avoid such triggering subjects as racism, colonialism, and sexism. They soon rescinded it, perhaps because they realized that if such subjects become taboo, much of their faculty would be left with nothing to talk about.

A terrible sort of insanity has gripped the Democratic Party. On almost a daily basis, when you see the party’s leaders in action, you want to start edging toward the door, murmuring “Nice doggie. Nice doggie.”

[snip]

This is a very bad thing. We need two functional political parties, and these days the Democrats don’t get over the bar, no matter how low you set it.

[snip]

Reid and Pelosi are so low-rent that you feel embarrassed for them whenever you see them. Screening a video [about Charles and David Koch] that is sheer partisan libel in the United States Capitol–illegally, as best I can tell–is right up their alley.

Read the whole thing, please, both because it’s beautifully written and because it’s substantively informative and important.

***

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the fact that it was no surprise to me that the poorest of the poor aren’t rushing to sign up for Obamacare. Contrary to our middle class expectations, they don’t mind having the ER serve as their preferred provider. Getting top flight medical care for free on an as-needed basis is a better deal for them than having to pay a monthly fee (no matter how low) for some hard to reach little clinic that makes them jump through hoops just to see a dermatologist.

Thanks to Obamacare, it looks as if a significant number of formerly insured (i.e., people who lost their insurance because of Obamacare) are also finding that the ER is a good option. Some haven’t even tried to get new insurance. Some have gotten trapped in the Obamacare exchange. Some have been told that they’re the wrong sex. Some cannot accept the substandard care in their new, narrow coverage. Whatever the reason, they’re joining the bottom 1% in seeing the ER as first and best when it comes to medical treatment.

***

Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon in Oregon, won the Republican party primary and will now challenge incumbent Democrat Jeff Merkley for Oregon’s Senate seat. No surprise, then, that Democrats have unearthed records showing that, in both a divorce and a contentious break-up with a boyfriend, the men contended that she was stalking, harassing, or even striking them. Neither sought restraining orders and the boyfriend has since become an enthusiastic (i.e., monied) supporter for her political campaign.

I’m dismissing the boyfriend stalking charge since he now supports her campaign. Whatever happened then, he clearly doesn’t think it affects Wehby’s ability to serve the people of Oregon and America.

The ex-husband charge (harassment and striking) intrigues me, because it reminds me very strongly of something that happened to a friend of mine. She and her husband were involved in a contentious divorce. Things came to a head when she went to his house (he owned it before they were married) to pick up some of her stuff. He refused to let her in, and said he would call the cops on her. She responded by yelling at him and swatting his chest.

You have to understand here that her soon-to-be ex stood at 6’2″ and was a burly man. My friend was 5’2″ and one of the physically weakest people I’ve ever met. She needed help lifting big binders. There was no possibility that she hurt or threatened him as she swatted him. Nevertheless, he had someone restrain her until the cops came along and then insisted that they arrest her.

My friend told me later that the cops apologized profusely for having to arrest her, because they recognized that the arrest was a travesty. Nevertheless, California law mandates that if a spouse says he was abused and demands that the alleged abuser gets arrested, then the alleged abuser must be arrested and prosecuted.

When the case went to trial, my friend was triumphantly acquitted and, I believe, the judge fined her ex for abusing both the divorce and criminal law processes.

That story makes me somewhat dubious about the claims from Wehby’s ex. In the context of a divorce, the problem nowadays isn’t just that one partner or another might become violent. It’s that one partner or another might lie about the other becoming violent.

***

She murdered two people and then lied about that fact when she came to America, got citizenship, and became an influential activist for Islamic interests in America. You and I might think that the victims in this case are the two dead men and the American people. Au contraire, my naive friends. She is the victim (of course).

***

The Marines are breathing a sigh of relief that one of their own finally got the recognition he deserved. Cpl. William Kyle Carpenter (ret.) will receive the Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a live grenade to save a comrade’s life. He was terribly injured in the blast.

“There are guys who I was with who didn’t come back, so it’s hard for me to wear this and have the spotlight on me the rest of my life when they lost their life on a hot, dusty field in Afghanistan and most people don’t even know their names,” Carpenter said. “Even at Walter Reed, I recovered with quadruple-amputees. How am I supposed to wear this knowing and seeing all the hardships that are much worse than mine that guys have gone through without any recognition?”

Carpenter sounds like a very worthy recipient for the nation’s highest military honor. To fully appreciate just how worthy, check out this article and check out this video:

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And to leave things on an equally uplifting, but somewhat more cheerful-in-a-silly-way note, here’s an adorable dancing two-year old. What I like particularly isn’t actually his dancing but is, instead, his “Vogue-ish” posing between dance moves:

I finally got around to watching Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the decade-long hunt for bin Laden. Before it came out, conservatives were concerned because the White House gave the filmmakers unprecedented access to information about the hunt and about the actual hit on bin Laden. This opened up the possibility that (a) the movie would betray America’s security secrets and (b) the movie would become a pro-Obama piece of political propaganda.

I don’t know whether the first fear was realized, but the second certainly wasn’t. Those who claim that the movie supports using torture to obtain information are correct. The movie opens with audio of phone calls from people trapped in the Twin Towers, and then shifts to a torture site somewhere vaguely Middle Eastern looking. The torturer is a CIA man. The person being tortured is a money man for al Qaeda. Having heard that audio, you are not sympathetic to the al Qaeda guy.

Because of the CIA’s torture tactics, the man gives them useful names. This happens repeatedly, with al Qaeda members getting hung in chains, hit, subject to water torture, deprived of sleep and human dignity, etc., and eventually revealing names and phone numbers. The movie makes it clear that they are not being tortured for fun. They are being tortured to get them to yield information about their, and other people’s, role in killing 3,000 Americans.

The film also makes the point that this information is necessary. Every so often, after showing CIA interrogations aimed at drawing out a little more information about al Qaeda, the film breaks in with news reports about the Khobar Tower bombing, or the London bombing, or the Islamabad Marriott bombing. The implication is that it’s vitally necessary for the CIA to crack open al Qaeda’s notoriously closed infrastructure.

The CIA operatives in the movie are dismayed when the situation in Washington changes, making “enhanced” interrogation techniques impossible. As one says when his boss demands that he get information, if they ask someone in Gitmo, he’ll just get lawyered up and the lawyer will pass on the question to al Qaeda, which can then use it to their advantage. The only “anti-torture” argument in the movie is a 30 second or so snippet of President Obama saying torture is “not who we are.”

That’s not who we are? What a funny way to frame a rather more fundamental argument: Are we, as a society, willing to have our public servants use torture for certain limited purposes? That’s the question, and the movie answers with a definitive “yes.” If using torture will get information that can save hundreds, thousands or (G*d forbid) millions of lives, torture is not just appropriate, it’s necessary. We don’t torture for pleasure or “to make a point,” we do it to save lives.

As for Obama’s that’s “not who we are” statement, I was struck then, as I always am, by how self-referential Barack and Michelle are. They were at it again in Africa. Michelle, the spoiled darling of a middle-class Chicago family, said that she’s just like the Senegalese (and before that, she was just like youths in Chicago’s worst ghettos). I know she’s striving for empathy, but it just ends up looking narcissistic.

Obama is worse, though, because he is America’s official spokesman. While in Senegal, the press asked him about his response to the Supreme Court’s decisions opening the door for national gay marriage. (By the way, I like Andrew Klavan’s take.) Obama, of course, approves. Not only did he say that, he used the question as an opportunity to talk about gay rights as human rights. This is actually an important thing, because gays are subject to terrible abuse in both Muslim and Christian Africa. No matter how one feels about gay marriage or homosexuality, the torture, imprisonment, and murder gays experience throughout Africa is a true crime against human rights.

With the gay marriage question, Obama — who is the greatest orator since Lincoln, right? — had the opportunity to make a profound statement about basic principles of human dignity. Instead, he embarked upon a wandering rumination about his feelings and his thoughts:

The issue of gays and lesbians, and how they’re treated, has come up and has been controversial in many parts of Africa. So Iwant the African people just to hear what I believe, and that is that every country, every group of people, every religion have different customs, different traditions. And when it comes to people’s personal views and their religious faith, et cetera, I think we have to respect the diversity of views that are there.

But when it comes to how the state treats people, how the law treats people, I believe that everybody has to be treated equally. I don’t believe in discrimination of any sort. That’s my personal view. And I speak as somebody who obviously comes from a country in which there were times when people were not treated equally under the law, and we had to fight long and hard through a civil rights struggle to make sure that happens.

So my basic view is that regardless of race, regardless of religion, regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation, when it comes to how the law treats you, how the state treats you — the benefits, the rights and the responsibilities under the law — people should be treated equally. And that’s a principle that I think applies universally, and the good news is it’s an easy principle to remember.

Every world religion has this basic notion that is embodied in the Golden Rule — treat people the way you want to be treated. And I think that applies here as well. (Emphasis added.)

No wonder that the Senegalese president Mackey Sall had no compunction about delivering a smackdown to the American president. And I do mean a smackdown, since he told Obama that he was a hypocrite to say that every culture has its own way of doing things, and Obama totally respects that, it’s just that the American way is better:

These issues are all societal issues basically, and we cannot have a standard model which is applicable to all nations, all countries — you said it, we all have different cultures. We have different religions. We have different traditions. And even in countries where this has been decriminalized and homosexual marriage is allowed, people don’t share the same views.

My head is spinning. I just wrote a post for Mr. Conservative based upon the most current news stories saying that an arrest had been made. From the time of those stories to the time I published the post, it was about 10 minutes. Within one minute after the post went up, all of the major news sites were recanting the story, saying a suspect had been identified, but not arrested. (See here for an example of the swift turnaround in news reports.) Breitbart has given up on specific headlines and just says “Chaos in Boston,” which is about as accurate as anything I’ve seen today. CNN still has its stand-by fallback position, which is that it’s the Tea Party’s fault, while Fox reminds everyone that pressure cooker bombers are commonly used in such Islamic war places as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

That last point — about the differing CNN and Fox News stories — highlights one of the two truths we know with certainty amidst this swirl of rumors. The first is that Obama lied through his teeth when he promised in 2008 that his election would heal divisions within America and that his presidency would further smooth the rift, once again creating a truly United States of America. Instead, using his bully pulpit to demonize half of America (something no president has ever done before), Obama has deepened the rift between Blue and Red America to a point probably not seen since 1860. Obama, therefore, is easy to blame for the bombing, because a truly united America would not be a good target for this type of attack, no matter who launched it.

The other thing we know with certainty is something that Pamela Geller highlights — we’re not getting any bang for the buck from the alphabet soup of federal law enforcement agencies we taxpayers support. After commenting derisively on reports that law enforcement describes the terrorism attack investigation as “wide open,” and is begging media outlets to help, Geller points out how embarrassing this is:

This is where the status of the investigation is. In Europe, and in Israel, whenever there is a terrorist attack, they have someone or some group in their sights or in custody every time. Take 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, the Glasgow jihad plot — every jihad attack and jihad plot in Europe, European authorities are right on it, identifying and apprehending the perpetrators. They know exactly who the bad guys are. They know exactly where to go. This is a historical first: that America is not dramatically ahead of the curve, but dramatically behind the curve. So American citizens are now considered expendable, just the way our soldiers are in Afghanistan.

It should bother every American that Europe and Israel are so far ahead of us in intel that we’re begging CNN and Fox for clues — and apparently detaining people who have nothing to do with the bombing, raiding their homes, taking bagfuls of evidence out, and then saying, “Never mind.”

Really? The billions that Americans spend for the CIA, FBI, DHS, NSA, JTTF, and all the other various counterterrorism agencies, and they don’t have a clue? All they have for us is 1-800-CALL-FBI? This is unconscionable. If that’s where we are, disband these incompetent, inane agencies that call jihad “workplace violence” and name Atlas Shrugs as a “domestic hate group,” when in fact Atlas Shrugs is battling violence and mass murder across the world. How did this happen eleven years after 9/11?

In 1995 (Oklahoma City) and 1998 (Atlanta), we didn’t have a multi-armed federal law enforcement infrastructure that, in return for tax dollars and vast, often unconstitutional powers, promised to keep us safe. Just as Obama broke his promise to heal the rifts in American society, the federal alphabet soup has broken its promise to keep us safe and/or to bring wrongdoers quickly before the law. Indeed, I seem to remember that it’s been more than half a year since the FBI jetted out to investigate what happened in Benghazi. So far . . . nothing (although with Hillary screaming “what difference does it make,” investigators may have lost their momentum).

I guess we should all resign ourselves that for at least the next three years, the best we can hope for from our administration is “What difference does it make?” Unless, of course, the difference is about emasculating our once robust Constitution. But that’s another story for another post….

That’s some big news. Three days after the President wins reelection, the head of the CIA, who just happened to be on the Benghazi watch, resigns, citing an affair. That opens the way to a lot of ideas.

I’ll accept that he was indeed having an affair. Did he resign because he was being blackmailed? If so, was he being blackmailed by a foreign entity or was the administration blackmailing him to keep quiet about Benghazi? And if the latter is true, does the fact that he resigned and that he identified the affair mean that he is escaping the administration’s grip and heading towards being a whistle-blower?

These are lovely conspiracy theories without a scintilla of evidence. I think you should feel free to spin out your own theories.

He’s not in a uniform, but Raymond A. Davis, former Special Forces soldier, and current CIA operator and prisoner in Pakistan is a soldier for American interests. Our own government has admitted that he “was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team collecting intelligence and conducting surveillance on militant groups deep inside the country.” When he was attacked as part of a robbery, he fired on the robbers, killing both.

The New York Times also reports that this may not have been a straight forward robbery. The implication is that Davis blatantly committed a crime. My suspicion, if it wasn’t a garden-variety robbery, is that Davis was attacked as part of his line of work.

When help finally came Davis’ way, the driver of the rescue vehicle managed to run over another Pakistani. Davis, who theoretically has diplomatic immunity, found himself arrested, thrown into a Pakistani prison, and made a cause celebre to the radicals and credulous street in Pakistan.

The Pakistani government, which has known all along about his CIA affiliation, is now hamstrung by the radicals on the street. They want Davis dead, and Pakistan is afraid of those radicals. However, given that Davis has diplomatic immunity, killing him is a problem.

Davis, of course, is in an even worse situation than the Pakistani government. He’s in a Pakistani prison, and has to hope that the government, to make its own life easier, doesn’t simply turn its back and allow a lynch mob in.

In a spy movie, the Americans and Pakistanis would arrange for Davis to be snuck out of the country, with no one the wiser. This isn’t a spy movie, though, and I don’t think there’s enough competence between the two countries right now to arrange for a “no one the wiser” scenario. It seems, right now, as if Davis’ best hope is prayer — which he certainly deserves for repeatedly putting himself on the line in the service of this country.